death of a salesman script act two booksellers penguin

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (January 11)Ī chance run-in at an airport between our nameless narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, and an acquaintance from college who has now become an art-world hotshot, Jeff Cook, sets the stage for Antoine Wilson’s taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you’ll struggle not to rip through in one sitting. It offers a sure- and light-footed wander through these heavy topics, though, written with grace and comedy as well as rigor. But finding does the same the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair.” The book grew out of a New Yorker meditation, “ Losing Streak,” which chronicles the experience of misplacing the mundane and suffering the utmost loss, but it moves far beyond it-into the literary, historical, and philosophical roots of both poles of experience.

Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny. As Schulz puts it in the book: “What an astonishing thing to find someone. But rather than the spoonful-of-sugar structure that this division implies, the book is united-even in its darkest moments-as a lively exploration of some of the strongest emotions we humans have the luck to feel and a wondrous look at how they work in tandem. The first half of Kathryn Schulz’s new book, Lost and Found (Random House), a sensitive and timely meditation on loss and grief, is balanced by the celebration of love and joy in the second half.

Chloe Schama Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez (January 4) The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster) picks up the mantel of writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, with their skin-crawling themes of surveillance, control, and technology but it also stands on its own as a remarkable, propulsive novel. The tool for her forensically monitored progress is an uncanny robot baby, meant to stimulate her, challenge her, and, crucially, record her every movement, from loving gestures to instants of inattention. But no degree of contrition will spare her from the authorities who descend, first removing her child and then transplanting her to an abandoned college campus turned dystopian re-education facility where she will, ostensibly, learn what it truly takes to be a good mother. It’s a terrible thing to have done, and she knows it. She doesn’t intend to be gone for long, but somehow time slips away, and before she realizes it, she’s been gone for hours. Jessamine Chan’s debut-like all truly terrifying nightmares-starts off in a banal, familiar way: an utterly exhausted mother, in a moment of sleep-deprived despair, does the unthinkable (and yet understandable) and walks out of her apartment, leaving her baby behind.

Death of a salesman script act two booksellers penguin